Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Long Dead

There's a silence in the air
A calm before the chaos
Of our misalignment laid bare
Before the flames, pain, and despair
Stop and gawk, point, and stare
Take heed of the stillness in the air

Winds of change lie in wait
As we inflate the divide
And fill it with our hate
With the pressure approaching an unstable state
We're faced with a matter of choice, not fate
But maybe its too late

We're buried in a society bent on its image
How it looks, and what it should wear
With the only concerns being
How much to keep
And how little to share

The motto adopted and repeated
Time after time:
What's fair is fair
What's mine is mine
In a life misaligned
Hear em sing!
What's mine is mine
Is mine is mine is mine....

Bringin' to life, life outta focus
Young minds misaligned
Money is the object of our eye
The only thing more important
Is to have just a little more than the other guy
It doesn't matter who it could help
Just imagine all it can buy!
Never mind the smoke in the sky
That fire's burnin' in some factory in a country on the otherside

So far It's been a wild ride
Bumps and ups and downs
But we gotta remember
Gravity intersects the ground
So I'm tellin ya
The higher ya fly, the faster ya fall
And the flames of the crash
Gonna engulf us all

Like ya head in the end of a cannon
Or cattle on the tracks standin'
Ya can see what's gonna happen
But on we go,
FULL SPEED AHEAD!
signals the Captain
As we follow an order of never endin' expansion
Diggin holes for McMansion after McMansion
Just dig a few more and demand
Will gain enough traction,
Man put the pedal to the floor,
Get this plan into action!

A growth reduction?

No. Fucking. Way.

Just cook up a little consumption,
Sure test the theory,
Press the assumption
Just load the guns'n know that
There's no need to change course
With no need for reflective introspection
The tube will capture the collective attention
During this brief interruption
Call it a pause, then resumption of our
Unending consumption

Whatever it takes,
Just get the trickle to a flow
If ya gotta, just borrow
And hope the debt is
Somethin' ya outgrow
But when ya decide where all that green oughta go,
Why not spend a bit on the tools of war
Ya know, after all, jobs are what the constituents voted for
Nevermind the votes before that sent their last job
To somewhere north of Singapore

Then why not fight the war
To deplete the stock
Forget the tick tock
Of the debt clock
(we rocked Iraq, anyone gotta plan for Iran?)
Maybe something "classic"
Uncle Sam?
Maybe another fight from the air
Something not so much "Man to Native Land"

Then cite the need to rebuild
And expand just a little more
All in the name of feet on a factory floor

Livin' as if everything is fine
As if this time will never be that time
And we can't see the red of our level line,
from tools bent and misaligned
When we're working with a green tint in our eye
Or when the clouds black the sky
Really, what good is it, what's it all for, and why?

Our own hands constructin'
A path to destruction
Built by all we've been destructin'
We're burning the fire
To freeze the ice
Just because we can
And ya know, it feels nice.
Then we turn around and burn the fire to melt the ice
Cheaply enough to never think twice about how
Homeostasis might be nice
For planets, to men, and even mice

Speaking of mice? Anyone got a mouse trap?

As I bring this rhyme to a wrap
One more freehand rant
Just a slice,
A representative sample
that outta be ample
Enough to stamp ya cranial implant
and light ya candle
If everything else was just too much to handle

To raise our food, plant and animal
We gotta burn the water
Otherwise meant for our cup
to pump the gas
to to power the machines
to mine the salts from the soil
That we use to re-salt the soil
To raise the food under our knife
Leaving behind, as much life
As a pot brought to boil
Then we soil the water in our cup
With the salt we used to raise our food
So it needs cleaned by a process best left unseen
All the while
We burn more water
to pump the gas
that powers the plant, and machines
That cleans the water
And raises our food
then our food raises more of us
and then we burn more water
Otherwise meant for our cup...

But, we all aren't drinking poison yet
So let's just keep going and see how bad
Our problems will get!

Worse.
Misaligned and mismanaged
up to our neck, I say it's an easy bet
Though, I get the impression that this is a lesson
We can all forget
Ya see, these problems, it took years to invent 'em
And today there's too much momentum
We see the problems and choices ahead
But we won't prevent 'em
So while we can, let's go get em!
I mean, we'll all be too long dead
To see the outcomes and regret 'em... Right?

3 comments:

This is FANTASTIC!! This poem articulates some thoughts that have been going through my head the past few weeks in such a witty way. The third and fourth stanzas made me want to stand up and cheer, "You tell 'em!" and there were many lines after which produced further screams... "Yeah!!"